


Find Your Partner

by Taabe



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 11:53:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6004996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taabe/pseuds/Taabe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Canada and Appalachia have something in common Jack and Bitty didn't expect. And they didn't expect to like it. But it does involve spinning ... </p>
<p>Written with unstoppable thanks and admiration for Ngozi Ukazu and her work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Find Your Partner

Student Center. A night in April. Maple keys on the sidewalk, and in the pathway lights the tree shadows are knobbed with catkins. Light from the windows falls on the steps — and inside a sound of music and voices.

We’re cutting through from the mail room. I have one of those ‘package too large for box’ slips. Jack looks up from a letter.

“What’ve you got?”

“Anticipation.”

He pretends to walk into me, grinning, and I sidestep an open door. People are spilling into the hall. The double doors to the common space where they have undergrad conferences and science fairs are standing wide, and the room is full of moving feet and laughter and the music we’ve been half-hearing. Live music. Fiddle, squeezebox, slap bass — _yankees WTF, y’all play bluegrass now? I’ll swear I’ve heard that on WAVE FM._

He lifts his head, maybe because I have without knowing it; he has that fractional look of concentration, and he says as if he’s talking to himself — Rêve du Diable.

I say “—? You don’t even know Adele, and you know an Appalachian hill tune?”

He says “Quebeçois.”

“Huh?”

“Y’all got it from us.”

“Then _y’all_ can learn to share. That’s a _mountain dulcimer_ she’s playing. They’re from _Kentucky_.”

“And you’d know this how?”

“Pre-dawn radio.”

When Katya called for early drill I used to drive to the rink in the dark, even before those BBC shows where you get the morning news from Uganda. There’s a college station I used to catch out of Louisiana. They play old folk, blues, Irish. Not my usual thing, but it kept me awake. I have an old sense-memory of the tightness in my neck when I’m concentrating on the worn road and tensing muscles in my back to fight off sleep; the sky is lightening over a smudge of brick buildings and live oaks, and a low, raspy voice over the speakers is blasting _Keep an Eye on Your Heart._

“Come on Bits.”

I haven’t seen anything like this since I stopped ice dancing, and I’m trying to see over people’s shoulders. The dulcimer player catches a nod from the fiddle and they change tunes without missing a beat. And the room is full of people spinning.

Guys in skirts. Guys in nothing but skirts. Girls in loose almost-off-the-shoulder cotton jumpers showing a flush up to their collar bones. People are spinning, holding each other and spinning. They’re moving all together in long double lines, all in patterns all based on circles, two together and then four and then one alone, all centripetal forces.

Then they all whirl into pairs in each other’s arms all at once in one long coil of notes. The fiddle runs down, and people are laughing as the music ends, hugging each other, leaning on shoulders and stripping off shirts and pairing off again. 

He shrugs. “You want to twirl, go ahead.”

He’s going to move off, but the line’s crowding into the doorway around us, and people are joining hands, counting off in fours. The ones near the door are left out, and they turn to us, holding out their hands — they’re flushed and beaming and expecting two jock guys to join them, and _WTF yankees again, I didn’t think anyone up here got that kind of warmth_ — someone has Jack’s hand and he’s saying “no, we’re not —“ as I’m bowing to the girl making arm-sweeping motions at me and curtseying me through the door, all a jumble of people surging like a celly (or a ceili?) — and he gives a look along his shoulder like Jack-not-ducking-a-team-hug, and we’re in the room. 

“I swear Bittle, the things you make me do — ”

I tip my head back to smile. “So how do you know this music?”

“My memere had records. She used to — they’re starting something.”

There’s a caller telling us how the dance will go, and everyone tries it out without the music. We walk through a few steps. Simple stuff, everyone holding hands, and then — there’s one where you take each other in waltz position and swing each other around. The caller is explaining it like walking in a circle, but the people next to us are flying. 

The music starts, fast, pattering, curling notes into spaces where you didn’t think they’d fit. He’s going through the motions, holding hands in a circle, how dorky is this, and then —

“Swing your partner!”

— He has a hand on my shoulder and a hand on my arm and he’s fumbling the steps. I’m moving with the rhythm, trying to guide with my body.

“Come on, work with me here. It’s in 4/4 for a reason.”

“Hey, are there 3/3 beats? Or 6/6?”

“Kinda. Lardo says you get something like that in polyrhythms. Keep some tension.”

I push against his hand with a taut arm. _You’re supposed to lean back and take your partner’s weight. We’re behind the beat._ The next call sends us in different directions —

“Swing your neighbor!”

— and the woman on my right is catching my eye. She’s taller than I am, and she’s dancing the guy’s part. She has me around the waist, and we’re whirling and the room’s whirling around us; the fiddle is rocking like a maniac, and I can’t feel my feet against the floor. Now I can feel the way this should go.

_God I’ve missed this. Your body and the music move together and it’s instinct, like the sweetest end-around and pass to just where you know the other guy will be. Ice-dancing moves in the Haus living room don’t count. And in kegsters you don’t dance with someone else; you dance with the whole room and yourself. Maybe that’s just me. But most of the known world gets this — most of the known world dances to live music. The whole room’s moving to the beat, and it’s moving to us._

With the music, moves that seemed simple skim over the floor, and people are livening it up — getting air — spinning fast. The tune changes and launches into something major and soaring and the room revs like an engine and I’m spinning — double time — triple time — flashing back, and he takes my hands, steadies me, pulls me in to him — 

“Hey Bittle. Check.”

— and we’re swinging. Easy as holding hands with someone and flinging yourself around until the world caroms. But he has a hand spread between my shoulders, and the caller said the way to keep from getting dizzy is to hold your partner’s eyes, and it isn’t helping —

“This is how you should’ve taught me to deal with physicality.”

He ducks his forehead to mine so I can hear him under the music, taunting, “square up and push through.”

They call the next move and we’re drifting in a wider circle of four. 

“Ladies chain.”

I move forward and a boy I’ve never seen in a kilt and a bandana sweeps an arm across my shoulders and scoops me around. Then Jack’s arm turning me back. Walking, just walking up the room, and I’m high. I’m at the end of the line. Jack puts his hands on my shoulders and turns me and turns me again, all the way back down. It’s like a celly, but it keeps on going. 

“Find your partners.”

Turning together.

“Balance.” I’m leaping, both arms in the air. 

“And swing.” A long swing, the music spiralling faster — he has me by the shoulders and I’m leaning into it and I’m weightless …

_Rans told me centripital force always carries a body in toward the center_

… and the music stops. Everywhere people are leaning on each other, breathless and sweaty like the team rushing the striker after a score. He’s got an arm around my head, holding me against his chest, and his heart is racing — I can feel it — and something else. He’s not wearing a cup and he’s. Oh. _Easing gently into a new position._ Maybe that’s why he never dances at the haus …

I roll with it. That’s what I do. I come up for air. He’s smiling. I smile. 

His hand rests on the back of my neck, and I half expect he’ll rough up my hair and turn it into a joke, but he looks at me with an intent expression I can’t read. 

“Come out with me?”

“Sure.” 

He waits a beat as though he’s making sure I mean it. Then he moves his hand almost casually down my back and we’re moving toward the door, high-fiving people as we go, as he’s swinging me around in one arm, picking up my bag with the other. I can still feel him breathing. I already miss the music and the warmth and the straight-up assurance it brought — I don’t know how else to describe it. But it has left the night open around it. Reoriented.

Out on the path I can feel myself breathing. The air moves on my face and the back of my neck, feeling wet again — I still can’t get over how the winter clamps down here, all silent and dry, until you forget how rain sounds on the roof. The first night we heard it in the rink at practice I couldn’t breathe right. Just like this.

The high is still there, and something tense, something I don’t recognize. I grope for conversation and come up with 

“What were you saying about your memere?”

“She listens to _contredanse_ when she’s —“

He gestures with both hands, molding air.

“— making bread.”

He looks down as though he can read my face in this half light. Maybe he can. He must know what I’m thinking. The first time I made bread in the Haus kitchen, and it wasn’t all that long ago. It took me awhile to work up to it, mostly because it takes so long, but I’d read on Epicurious about setting out the dough the night before and shaping the loaves the next day — it was a raw morning, the kind that makes me talk about what the redbuds are doing back home, and my dough and the bowl and the kitchen were cold. I was looking under the dish towel and Jack came up behind me and looked over my shoulder and said “What’s up?”

I said “I think it’s rising ok. It usually does at night …” 

And Shitty cracked up, quietly until Jack left the room, you know … and then he looked at me steadily, gently, and he said “give it time, brah.”

So an hour later Shitty comes in and I’m leaning hard against the table with my hands in the dough and my face hot. I’ve taken it out of a warm oven and scooped it onto the floured counter, and I’m pressing down into it.

He says “you’re staring at it like it can tell the future — _mycomancy_ , divination by yeast.”

I say “It’s not crystal balls you have in mind.” _Or me either. Goddamit._

“You chirpin me, Bits?”

I grind the heels of my hands into the dough, pushing myself up standing. “Just practicing for the game tomorrow.”

He comes up to look over the table at me. Then he reaches out and scoops up a ball of dough and turns it in his hands. Still looking at me.

“You’ve got game, Bits.”

“Well. Thank you.” I’ve got dough to the elbows and flour all down my shirt. I look at him. It would be easier …

So there we were, Bitty shirtless and kneeding and Shitty au natural buttering bread pans with his hands, and Jack came in again and walked over and said “what’re you doing?” and … ran his hands into the dough. Over mine. Following the movement, pressing in, folding toward me.

He said “how do you do this?” off-hand like he’s riding me about caring that none of the Stop & Shops around here carry stone-ground whole wheat — and kept on rocking his hands, and so I kept on, looking at my hands under his, shaping the dough into a cone and flattening it and not saying anything that might make it stop. The dough was turning warm, elastic, air bubbles releasing and subsiding … The outside door opened and voices came into the hall. Shitty said something to someone, Jack laughed and threw a ball of dough at him, Shitty threw one at me, we were dripping four and pasting each other with scraps and I stopped them from making silly shapes … they glooped up bits of dough off the chairs and helped me make the loaves. 

When the bread came out, crusty and still soft with the butter melted on top, I found them both and gave them a piece. He looked up at me over his shoulder and said “thanks.” He closed his eyes when he bit into it. I stayed in the doorway while he ate it, one bite at a time.

 

I half turn under a light post. “You’re telling me you knew how to knead —“

“Yes. No. — _qu’importe?_ I just wanted —“ He meets my eyes. “Did you mind?”

“Is that a joke?” I shrug, willing to laugh.

“No,” he says, and he isn’t laughing. “It wasn’t.”

“Then no,” I say, quietly, to my hands. “I — didn’t.”

He is walking close to me; I keep half stepping off the path. The path divides again and he angles to the outside, my side, and I move with him. We’re not walking toward the Haus. At least there’s that. This silence feels charged, twanging like the face-off, and I don’t want to take it indoors to the pong and sriracha and whatever’s on TV.

I can smell earth and crushed grass. We’re coming up on the pond. The ground’s getting soft under foot. There’s a shrub tree just off the path, pussy willow buds, silver-green and velvet. I reach up to touch them, and rain slids down my fingers. I’ve been waiting weeks for these.

The peepers are calling in the dark. 

I can hear Chowder swinging through the kitchen door where Shitty and Rans and I were working around the table while I stirred tomato sauce. He came in yelling “guys, the coolest thing! We heard down by the pond — it’s like a thousand crickets — she says they’re tree frogs!”

“ _Pseudacris crucifer_ ,” Shitty said. “They wake up with the vernal pools.” 

Rans said, “You know they can actually freeze and thaw out again? They can get down to like 17 degrees and still wake up.”

“And they’re, like, less than half an inch long.”

Chowder stares like he’s seen the eighth wonder of the world.

“Can you even imagine how big a tree must look to them?”

 

Does Chowder know what makes the peepers call? I’ll remember their voices all night.

 

Jack’s voice in the dark, over my head. “ _Les jours s’en vont._ ”

He’s looking at my hand on the branch.

“Now the season’s over I can — I wanted to say —“ He’s fumbling, tense. 

“You remember when we watched that documentary on Alan Turing?”

_Do I remember? Five of us on the couch and me against the arm with you squinched over next to me? I tried to make pop corn and you told me not to._

“I remember. It’s the first time I knew you were really ok with it. With me.”

“Stop. You’re making me feel like a bastard.”

He puts his hands on my shoulders. I’m looking up, and he is looking down at me. 

“Eric —“

His voice, uneven, exposed, clear — acoustic.

“I’m always ok with you.”

I’m shaking.

I look down again. Then up. It was hard enough to accept what I wanted. Who I wanted. Can I make you understand that no one has ever looked at me and wanted — No one. Ever. Objectively I know I can make people look at the way I move. I’m a performer. I know this. What the hell does it matter?

 

He is standing very still, his hands up toward his chest, like that first day on the ice at 4 a.m., and he has the same look. He says, “I’m sorry. You’ve always been open.”

Ok. I hear that.

I move close against him, and his arms close around me. My head is against his shoulder. His is against my hair.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I say into his shirt.

His hand touches my back lightly, moves down, more firmly when my shoulders relax. Rubs my neck. Goes on quietly being there.

“You sure?” His voice is husky. Dear Lord in heaven.

“God, yes. I just don’t _believe_ it.”

He must hear my voice break. He must feel me shivering. 

“If you’re scared, it’s all right. I’m not asking you to do anything you don’t want to.”

“Jack — it’s not that — I’ve never been here before.” 

I feel him realize I’m not crying — I’m laughing. In release, high on the sheer newness and — and bigness — of this feeling, and the absurdity of it —

“I don’t even know what to do now. I don’t know _how_ —”

And he is shaking with me, and we’re laughing together, holding each other hard and spilling over euphoria, rocking in friendship. It’s the high of the dance with mud on my shoes. I’ve got a house in Glory Land.

He cups a hand around my head, his breath warm on my neck, until I can feel the movement when he says —

“Ok?”

“Ok.”

“Just checking.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is written in thanks and in fun for Sanj, who recently introduced me to "Check Please!" I don't know from hockey, and only a little about one trace element of Canada. And it's not Jack and Bitty's usual thing. But I got to thinking each of them might try it once if the other one did ... And kitchens, now, kitchens have all kinds of potential.
> 
> What Jack says at the end, "les jours s'en vont," comes from Apollinaire, a World War I poet, from "Le Pont Mirabeau." _The days go by._


End file.
